The next installment in the Mario Party franchise is finally here, and it’s packed with more boards, characters, and minigames than ever before. Mario Party Jamboree is the most robust entry and caps off the series’ successful run on the Switch.
While there’s plenty to discover and explore on your own by playing the game, longtime Mario Party fans will be looking to unlock as much content as possible quickly. We all want to play every board right away to find our favorites and spend some time in the shoes of new playable characters. Luckily, the unlockable characters and boards in Jamboree are pretty easy to unlock!
When you first start playing Jamboree, you’ll immediately see two mystery figures on the character selection screen. In past Mario Party entries, unlocking new characters took a lot of grinding — from winning a certain amount of games to long minigame marathons — but in Jamboree, you can unlock new characters immediately. You just have to know where to look.
Both secret characters will join the party if you spot them from the hot air balloon. You won’t be able to see them without zooming in though, so here’s where to look.
Pauline, Mario’s first damsel in distress in the arcade game Donkey Kong and the mayor of New Donk City from Super Mario Odyssey, is waiting on a small sandbar between the Mario Party island and Minigame Bay. Zoom in to find her, interact with her, and she’ll become a playable character.
Nijies are typically enemies in the Mario universe, appearing first in Super Mario Bros. 2 and popping up in newer installments like Super Mario Run and Super Mario Bros. Wonder, but are joining in on the fun this time around. You can find Ninji atop a pair of islands behind the Rhythm Kitchen building. Just zoom in and interact with Ninji to have them join the party as a playable character.
There are four playable boards when you first boot-up Jamboree: Mega Wiggler’s Tree Party, Rainbow Galleria, Goomba Lagoon, and Roll ’em Raceway.
Three more boards are hidden at first, although you can still spot where they’ll live on the map: Western Land, Mario’s Rainbow Castle, and King Bowser’s Keep.
To unlock these extra boards, you just need to play games by leveling up and moving along Jamboree’s Rewards track, a free battle-pass-esque system. You level up by playing the game and completing achievements. The new boards unlock at the following ranks:
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.